[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,

Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.

And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.

This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.

Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.

[ahtihn]

> Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?

Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.

So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.

[trumpdong]

When you have only a few thousand people in an area you can hunt the wild animals that are breeding more than humans. Resources will be abundant again. Today we need all this infrastructure to feed so many people as if we all just started hunting there would quickly be no deer left, but people back then could treat deer as an infinite resource, and if the future is like back then, so will they.

[geodel]

Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?

Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.

The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?

>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium

All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.

>Total extinction seems unlikely.

Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?

>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,

Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.

When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.

When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.

[trumpdong]

Why do you think nothing will change in 350 years? Where were we 350 years ago? We thought population was stable back then with less than 1 billion people. Is it plausible that things will change again in the next 350? I think so. I think at least one thing changes about the world in every 350 years.

[sethammons]

This is NOT human extinction. Just the collapse of global modernity.

Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm? "Guess we wont try to live like people have for the last x million years, here is a good place to lay down and die."

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Why would the last group of N people not subsistence farm?

Why would they be able to reinvent that, when none of their ancestors for how many generations did so? Is that something a person can do well, do you think, with no prior experience or expertise? What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?

We could ask why they could reinvent all the technologies that people from prior eras of agriculture could manage? Will they instantly be able to make their own ropes, do you think? Have you ever made rope? Does it not count as technology if it's not a transistor etched into a silicon wafer? But previous eras of history did utilized that quite a bit for their agriculture. Are they supposed to make due without? There must be a hundred different things they won't know how to do, but were necessary for agriculture in any era of history you might name, but that you can't name because you know nothing about it.

Technologies, ones so mundane that you don't even recognize they exist, permeate the world. They're lost and then they're gone because a replacement was better. But when the replacement disappears, those lost technologies don't spring back into existence magically. Civilization is "path dependent", it doesn't get knocked back to previous tiers because those previous tiers cease to exist once we've moved on to the next. And it's really hilarious to me that not only are you ignorant of this, but you're snarky about it too.

[triceratops]

> when none of their ancestors for how many generations [farmed]

Because they'd still have books and seeds and farming implements lying around? And maybe some actual farmers to learn from?

> What if they get it wrong, they'll starve?

Probably, yeah many will starve. Early English settlers in North America had very little farming experience and many died. Enough survived to build colonies.

[bombcar]

They don't need to reinvent it - the Amish are doing it right now to some variation of "Amish on a tractor" if you want.

Insisting that negative population growth necessarily means extinction is as silly as saying that positive population growth necessarily means people standing on people from coast to coast.

[sethammons]

People live in the alaskan bush. QED

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Does a full, capable, lively civilization live in the Alaskan bush? Or is just a few grizzled assholes doing it to prove that they can?

And do those assholes have enough spare time and effort and interest to raise families? Any women of reproductive age out there with them?

If not, this probably isn't the model that proves that human extinction is an unreasonable worry.

[defrost]

You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology .. moreover there are people alive still hunting and gathering.

They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself.

Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology

Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands, which is silly on its face. It's not just the bronze/iron/steel work. Now we're back to "can you make a rope?"... can you? I think with an hour or two you could make something. If I brought the tool for you to use. And if you had the fiber for it. But it takes quite alot of practice to get good at it, I'll never get there. And even if you had the tool (haha, sandcast one in iron for bonus points!), and had the practice, now you're a fucking hemp/jute/sissal/something farmer just to have enough fiber to make the ropes to plow, but you're no longer growing grain so you don't need the plow. Why is this minimal technology so uncooperative, do you think? Why do you need so many fucking specialties just to do subsistence farming? Maybe you should go out there like they did 12,000 years ago with a stone hoe and plant the seeds stooped over, one at a time. I'm sure the yields will be high enough with that that humanity's numbers can start growing again instead of shrinking.

>Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

Cute, someone who watches video instead of reads. That's... I dunno. Maybe if you read, you'd understand how centuries ago this continent was so full of game that those Europeans who saw it were astounded, but now there's practically nothing left. Not enough to feed a recovering civilization with anyway. Even if they used firearms instead of the spear in that video. I'll even forgiven that now you've stepped back even further from the subsistence agriculture thing to hunting-and-gathering. Maybe humanity should crawl back into the ocean and become fish too... that's how we'll beat extinction.

[defrost]

> Actually, I know alot more about this than you do.

So you say.

> Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it?

What, another one? We used oxen and draught horses rather than mules.

> you think just anyone could construct or procure a plow in the Mad Max wastelands,

I live in Australia, I know where many working old ploughs are - most of the farms here still have them on display - there are several on this very property.

> Now we're back to "can you make a rope?

Sure - been there, down that, have you?

Look, this is getting dull - I'm 70, I grew up in a remote location, my father, still alive, born in 1935, fed his family as a child while his father was away at war - I've often spent months in remote areas.

In the event of the collapse of the modern US tech sphere some humans will get by, others will not.

[bombcar]

This whole line of argument has been incredibly entertaining to me, given those I know who could build a functional plow out of the ruins of damn near anything made of metal - even freeway signs can be made to service.

That's not even counting those who can keep old Farmall tractors running on whatever they have laying around. It's not the greatest, but it's functional, and a mechanical horse is way more powerful than a real one - and even then, real ones are still quite capable of supporting more than subsistence.

[imtringued]

This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.

Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.

Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch. There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.

Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.

Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.

The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.

The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.

The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.

But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.

>You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.

Which was never any assertion of mine. People are going to be the problem. Workers are going to be the problem. A shrinking population doesn't have a surplus. And while you're busy trying to build the slightly less efficient industrial society without enough people to run it, your population continues to shrink... meaning you have to downgrade again. But you never quite seem to downgrade enough, because right when you think you've struck the balance, you have fewer people necessitating another downgrade.

Remember all the posts here that talk about how the reason people don't have kids is that the economy's bad? They need more pay and more child care subsidies and diapers are too expensive and people would rather spend that money on themselves and blah blah blah? Do you think they're going to feel so prosperous in your "slightly less efficient industrial society"? They aren't going to be cranking out 8 or 10 babies. All the things you're doing to make it so that civilization can hang on a little longer make them miserable in ways that you all have identified as the disincentive to parenthood.

How is this not obvious to you? What sorts of willful denial of reality does it take to arrive at your conclusion? In my city of 350,000 people we have more dog groomers and pet stores than we do pediatrician clinics. They're closing elementary schools (the Facebook posts about these are hilarious, no one seems to get it). And you think that solar panels can fix what's broken (are there any solar panel factories in North America, come to that?).

[defrost]

> This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.

Harsh, I thought of it more as having an adorable level of cluelessness.

> no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined

Indeed, both for economies of scale and for the fact that existing modern farmlands are like butter to work - the major and minor tree roots of the past are gone, the rocks have been picked or sifted out, deep clays have been ripped up and mixed with sandy surface soils, etc. In this part of the world there are many 4,000 hectare farmlands made up of uniformly graded soils ready to work with less energy input than virgin land requires (whether with new or old methods).

Veering away from looking backwards:

We're also on the cusp of having self docking and charging autonomous agri bots running from battery farms - not quite there yet .. but "watch this space".

The trick with such things is keeping rent seeking cloud based VC's out of the loop and parts replaceable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljEKN7CsjnM